


Inviolate

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 15:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2393786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>M forges a perfect weapon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inviolate

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slightly darker take on M's mentorship of Bond as a younger agent. It contains scenes of dubious sexual coercion, and while there is no sexual contact between them, it can definitely be seen as sexual grooming. Please proceed with caution.

James Bond is twenty-nine when he is headhunted, when MI:6 finds him and she introduces herself, the tiny woman with short, tawny hair, for the first time as M—short for nothing, Mr. Bond, and certainly not Mary, so he can put that thought just exactly where it came from.  They meet at Heathrow, he from the Antilles and still tanned from the ship’s deck and she fresh from Hong Kong after the handover.  She can still smell the faint stink of mainland China on her clothes, a chemical, burning smell that she will never forget and he will for the rest of his life associate with her caustic wit and razor-edged personality.  She finds him flirting in the cigarette lounge and stares at him with pinched lips.

He is not destined to become the greatest spy in Her Majesty’s secret service.  Oh, he doesn’t fail—he’s fiercely intelligent, dogged enough not to stop until well past prudence, savvy enough that interrogation is little more than a clever game for him—but subtle, James Bond is not.  The marks pick him up from across the room, and he sits in his skin like a man who’s worried about passing tests and she wonders; she picked him because she likes a particular type of agent, because she works best with a pry bar rather than a lock pick, because why peer through the shades when you can break through the glass?  But she’s been wrong before, completely.  She’s chosen men too delicate, too damaged, and watched them fall because she’s put faith where she ought not.

It is on a day when she intends to tell him she is recommending him back to the Navy she finds him.  Something in his posture is familiar, reminds her of an older generation of spies, of the Double-oh who’d driven her director around the bend whilst she sat outside his office typing letters the director would later pretend to read before signing.  She’d all but run the Office for a decade before the man had finally had the good sense to die so she could inherit the role officially.  Bond reminds her in this moment of a man who’d made her flush despite herself, who’d made her stammer and who’d offer dinner and drinks he’d never intended to take her for.  Bond is a classic man, old-fashioned in many ways, an antique.  She watches.

She knows what he wants from the girl he is crowding.  All three of them do—there is a test at the end of the week and Bond, juvenile Bond, has spent the preparation time already, first gambling raucously with his classmates and then drinking privately and sleeping through his courses.  The girl’s his trainer’s assistant, the one who collects the trainees’ paperwork and files the results, and Bond has no reason to speak to her.

Oh, he’s not the first to try it.  Every batch of new trainees has one who gives it a go, and it’s not uncommon for Sarah to simply give them a shot of mace to the eyes before coolly stepping over them.  No, what’s uncommon is the pretty blush on Sarah’s cheeks, the way her lips are curled around a smile.  Bond leans on the wall overhead, posture aggressively deferential, head inclined.  M slides closer.

“I love it,” Bond is murmuring, voice low and intimate.  “The taste, the feel of it under my tongue—”  M freezes; surely he’s not—“You’d taste divine, Sarah.  Any man who would think otherwise is a fool.”

Sarah’s eyes are bright, hungry.  “I’ll be fired if we’re caught.”

“Then I’ll make it worth it,” Bond tells her.  “If you make it worth it.  You want to make it worth it, don’t you, Sarah?”

They disappear down the hall, and M waits.  Sarah is fired, but Bond’s test is exactly four points away from perfect.  The next day she calls him into her office, because she has a use for him.

Six is the sector of Military Intelligence that deals with foreign threat.  Like all of her agents, Bond has a gift for languages; like many of her best agents, he has trouble sitting still.  She takes a malicious glee out of watching him squirm in her chair and remembers that twenty-nine isn’t really so old yet, that he’s honestly a child.  She has his exam on the desk in front of her, and she can imagine what he thinks she’s called him for.  He’s wrong.

“Tawse?  Or cane?” she asks instead, resting her fingertips lightly on the page.

“Beg pardon?” he asks, and oh, he can be cocky when he feels threatened.  M bites back a smug grin.

“Tawse or cane?  Which did your head of house use on your behind when he found you with her?” she asks as if speaking to a particularly slow child.  He stares at her defiant, eyes chips of blue ice in his face.  She’s startled him—good.  “Oh, I’d imagine the little tart was fired—Sarah was fired; did you know that?—but I don’t imagine your schoolmaster would have hesitated at the opportunity to peel a strip off that randy little hide of yours.  So which was it?  The tawse or the cane?”

Bond watches her, and she can imagine hate in his eyes.  Finally: “Paddle.  He didn’t dare use anything that might welt or cut.  He was too angry.”

“I know the feeling.”

He goes still, watchful.  She approves.  “I’m afraid I—”

She cuts him off with an imperious wave.  “Did he make you skin your trousers down?  Pants?”

“That’s none of your damned business,” Bond snaps back.  “Ma’am.”

She ignores his surly cordiality.  “You were released from one of the most prestigious schools in the country for fucking the chambermaid, isn’t that so?” she asks, but it’s not really a question.  He stares.  “Well?”

“Three.”

Yes, the file said he was a repeat offender.  “Explain what you mean,” she says.

“Three,” he repeats.  She waits.  He’ll spill eventually; boys like Bond like to brag.  He doesn’t disappoint.  “I had sex with three of them.”

“Why?”

“Because they made it easy.”

“They came on to you?” she asks, disappointed.  If she were looking for more of the same—

“No.”  Bond’s mouth curls into a frown.  “They made it easy.  They weren’t meant to do it, but when I asked, they did.  It was easy.”

And now they’re getting somewhere.  “How were you caught?  Were you in her pants?”

“This conversation seems—”

“—to be moving at a snail’s pace.  I do agree, Mr. Bond, so if you would answer the question?  How were you caught?” she repeats, biting each word into crisp, cracking syllables.

Bond pauses, licks his lips.  Considers whether or not to tell the truth, and the decision is obvious as he makes it.  “She got pregnant.”

“Yours?”

“Does it matter?” Bond asks.  “She said it was.  Seems she missed the memo that I wasn’t as wealthy as my classmates.”

“Did you love her?”

“What does love have to do with sex?”

Yes.  He’ll do nicely.

::

“I want you to tell her you want to taste her cunt,” she tells Bond over the headset.  Villiers jumps, startled.  She ignores his stare.

“No,” Bond says.

“You’ll do as I bloody well tell you to and like it, Junior Agent Bond,” she snaps, and Bond chuckles low in her ear.  The woman he’s talking to is an extravagantly wealthy heiress to a diamond fortune.  Bond leans close to her.

“That dress makes you look like a whore,” he says instead.  “Like I could have you for a tenner and get change back.”  

She’s going to kill him.  She’s going to walk right into that party in Vienna and—the heiress makes a quiet, desperate sound of want and Bond purrs like a satisfied cat.  In the end, M and Villiers end up listening in as Bond fucks her, and in between rounds they listen to her version of pillow talk—vault entry codes.  The mission takes twelve hours less than anticipated and has only two fatalities.  Both are on the other side.

But the best thing about her boy is that he’s biddable.  No, he won’t listen to a damned word she says to guide him, and trying to walk him through a mission as she watches is an exercise in frustration, but when she tells him to fuck his way into the pants and secrets of some of the most powerful women in the world, he doesn’t balk.  After the first time, Villiers knows better than to react; eventually his feud with Bond is enough that he doesn’t care.  Bond fucks his way through five of the continents and only misses the other two because they’re difficult to get to before an incident in Gdansk means there’s a new job opening available in the Double-oh division.  She knows who she wants to fill it.

She puts his name in the hat and sends him out before she knows it’s been accepted; when he comes home with a broken wrist and plaster dust down his front, she doesn’t have the heart to tell him the directors have thought him too young.  He’s not, anyway.  Too young.  Something inside him is very old now, some dark shadow in his eye that she sees settle in through the line of his shoulders in the grainy black and white security camera as he beats a man to death.  The violence trembling in his limbs as he stands over the man on the film is beautiful, her lovely blunt instrument.  She’ll never tell him how she’s reprimanded for it, and he’ll never know that it is this moment more than any other that redirects his destiny, shaping it into something new.  She gets him promoted; he pays her back in full.

She’s not unaware of each ‘ma’am’ that sounds like ‘mum’, of the way he seeks her approval like heliotrope following her sun, clinging and hungry for her gaze.  She would feel guilt for it if she could spare the feelings to feel guilt, but instead there is a steady sense of pride, of accomplishment.  The first time he brings down an international crime syndicate with his own unique blend of sex and violence, she pours him a whisky and pretends not to see the shaking limbs, and when she brags to the committee that the ends justify the means, it is his successes and not his weaknesses she points out.  He forms an attachment, of course, but he’ll get over that soon enough.  They usually do.

Until Montenegro.  Montenegro and the Casino Royale and her plans like a house of cards, almost all blown over by the breath of Vesper Lynd.  She’s pretty, M will grant her, but stupid in the ways that pretty young women are; she’d let a great weapon like James Bond go sheathed for the rest of his life.  She’d let him rust.  Even so, M does have a heart—his facade cracks once and only once, and when he returns to her arsenal reforged in harder, colder steel, she does not congratulate herself.  He was bent, nearly broken, and she resolves to take better care of her tin soldiers.

But she’s not stupid, and nor is she deaf, dumb, or blind.  By the end of the issue with Dominic Greene, Bond has a reputation: fuck first, shoot later.  He’s a joke amongst the junior agents, a relic from a long-gone past, but she’s shaped him so precisely, so perfectly; James Bond is a well-wrought switchblade in a cheap gun show—elegant, lethal, brutal.  Deceptively familiar, disarmingly old fashioned.  Deadly.  He is her proof that the old ways still work, her one agent worth ten, the paperwork cold and black and white and potent: his success rate is astronomical, and for that she can sweep an embassy bombing or two under the rug.

He tries it on her once, when her Thomas dies.  Only once, with strangely earnest eyes and soft lips.  He is drunk, she is furious.  It never happens again.  She wonders idly what she has done to him to convince him to turn his weapons on her; she’s almost more disconcerted to believe he may have meant it.  Sex for Bond is a toy he does his best to break, and the thought of him attempting affection with her sends cold chills up her spine.  They don’t ever speak of it.

They speak of other things, though “speak” may be misleading: they scold one another, going round after round on the subject of worth, and he fails psych test after psych test that she doctors to keep him in the field.  He is broken, she can acknowledge, but he’s broken in just the right ways.  He’s getting old now, settled in—she knows she’ll have to train up another, but where will she find the time?—but for now he’s still good, still useful if only by the skin of his teeth.  She pushes another failed evaluation off her desk, flips through the CVs of new hires, and decides she’ll keep him a little bit longer, even as he creeps ever closer toward retirement.  And then he disappears.

When he comes back he has let himself fail her.  He comes back breaking, splintered, fragile.  He avoids her, fucks his way through the city as though it doesn’t matter where he puts his cock, and when she asks him if he doubts her, for the first time he can’t answer.  He works, the way an antique revolver works in the gloved hands of a restorationist, all of his parts creaking and tired and worn out, and yet somehow it’s her that ends up leaving.  It’s M that ends up gone.

::

Mallory sits on the other side of the desk, eyes sober and curious.  Bond looks away.  

“You can’t write me up for fucking her,” Bond says, and Mallory shakes his head.

“You compromised the mission, Double-oh Seven.  None of what you gathered is admissible in court; it was obtained under duress.

“I want you to consider therapy,” Mallory tells him, and Bond scoffs so hard his septum hurts with it.  Mallory doesn’t laugh.  He doesn’t scold the way she would have, doesn’t discuss the mysterious “they” who sometimes ask him to abstain during a mission.  Bond doesn’t remind him that there’s no benefit in tying himself down, in holding on to prudish priggery—that’s her line, though she hadn’t had to use it since.  Since.  When he breathes, Bond’s chest shudders.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bond tells Mallory.  He plays cool, droll.  There’s panic welling in his chest, a panic attack that feels as though he’s been shot.  His fingers tremble on the desk.  Mallory is quiet, and in that moment Bond feels impossibly old.


End file.
